Leading With 💕 Love

Hello, cadres. Fear. Anila here from habit aware, coming to you with lived experience with an Alphabet soup of mental health conditions, bfrbs, trichotillomania, PMDD, adhd, anxiety, depression, substance use. All the things, but all of them in the past. And before I start our chat about leading with love, I wanted to just pull up. I joined Rachel's affirmation chat at 02:00 today, and I wanted to pull up real quick what I reflected and heard from her affirmations. And, of course, I have a thousand screens open.

So there we go. Here we go. So, Rachel. Hello, Cadre. Rachel had a beautiful affirmative statement for us 30 minutes ago, and you can catch the live. You can catch the recording. And I know she's going to post in the feed as well. And from that, as she was saying, statements, the ones that resonated, I kind of rewrote to and kind of reflected back. And I appreciate you, too, Cadre and Cadre family. I'm really glad that you are here with me today, because we have lots of lovely things to talk about.

So I just wanted to write down what I heard reflected in Rachel's notes, and I have them on a Trello board. I have all of my oh, yay. Speak wonder. Good to see you again. And I'm glad you caught Rachel's live, too. Wasn't it so, like, I don't know, reinvigorating for the day? That's been kind of crazy. So what I do is, for managing my life, I've started using a Trello board, and one of the boards on my Trello board is life reminders and inspirations. And so this is what I wrote down from Rachel's affirmation session 30 minutes ago.

I am staying joyfully in the present. I'm staying open to receiving what the universe has in store. I am detaching from outcome. I have no need to plan because I still have time, and I will be okay. And all of those sentiments around being in the present moment about not planning, uh, not, you know, taking life seriously, detaching from the outcome and just focusing on the. The process and the. The begin. The. Instead of focusing on the beginning and the end, it's focusing on the middle. That's staying present in the moment.

Right. All of this is also what I'm hearing in a lot of the spiritual and manifesting work and that I'm reading and watching videos and that kind of thing and trying to really embody and impart in myself and try to learn so that I can teach it to my kids. So I just wanted to share that because I thought it was a wonderful, you know, speak wonder. Your name is exactly what it was. It was speaking wonder and joy into our lives. And so I love that. And I wanted to just share that with you. And hopefully you will go check Rachel's recording to hear the full, real affirmations.

Sorry, my computer's going off and her post. Good afternoon, Jules. Good to see you. And today, as it relates to leading with love, I kind of just wanted to talk about what the alternatives to leading with love are. Because if you're not leading with love, then what are you leading with? And maybe for the folks that are still with us, the Cadre team, speak wonder. Jules, you know, let me know in the comments. Like thinking through your life, what emotional states have guided your actions in the past, and maybe what is work, what is guiding you now, and has it changed?

And as you type those in, I will share that. As I'm writing my memoir, I'm realizing that I was leading with fear, with doubt. I have caught myself leading with ego. The more I'm aware of what I'm doing and living with more awareness. And hopefully I haven't been. But I have seen others in our society and our culture lead with greed. And I think that also comes from a scarcity mindset as well. That mindset of I can't share what I have, which would be love, because there's only so much of it. And I think that when we lead with love and we share what we have, it amplifies and it multiplies and speak.

Wonder shares fear of rejection once guided me. More confidence now. Yes, I think that idea of fear, what fear. Right. Is really spot on, because fear could mean many things. Fear could be fear for your life, safety. Fear could be fear of rejection. Fear could be many different avenues for fear. So I think really drilling into what type of fear is really important so that you can get to okay, if it was that fear of rejection, and I think that one, for me, is really what hits home. Because growing up, I moved and I didn't have good friends and I didn't feel welcomed.

And so I was feeling rejected in lots of different ways. And that led to lack of self confidence, lack of, and a lot of shame. And so now that shift to confidence, that shift to feeling good in myself, that other people's opinions don't matter, it's how do I feel about myself? And so when you can identify, like, the fear, the type of fear, then it can also help you. Signus, like get to, well, what's the opposite? So for fear of rejection, I want to be more confident in myself. Fear, as Jules saying, fear of unworthiness or inability.

And that probably is judge, you know, we'll then get to judgment like other people's judgment. So then maybe it's. I want to work on feeling more capable, and it all kind of winds up tying out at the end, right? As you're more capable in something, your confidence builds, and all of it ladders to love, ultimately, that you feel good about yourself. You're able to love yourself more when you are being the person that you want to be. And the trick is to still love yourself when you're not being the person you, you know you want to be when.

When you slip into old habits or when you let the anxiety take over. I was listening to another for. To a recording of a live earlier today, and I'm so sorry that I'm blanking on the person's name, but they were sitting in Palm Springs in beautiful weather by a pool, and it was something about the mental health therapist's best trick or golden rule. And so the golden rule is treat others as you want to be treated. But the flip of it was the golden rule, which is treat yourself the way you would treat others.

Right, so that we're so hard on ourselves. And I think that also goes into play here, where we're not loving ourselves, we don't. That's another way of saying it. Evan Lieberman. Thank you, Jules. I appreciate you for remembering names so terrible with names, but I can see Evan's face as I was watching him today speak. Wonder says, I used to lead from other people's templates of leadership. Leading with love always wins the day. Yeah, I love that. And I like that idea of looking to people who inspire us as a template to kind of copy as a template to practice so that we can become that person we want to be.

You know, they say, like, surround yourself with people that you want to be like or people that encourage you, that inspire you, versus people that are, you know, maybe not. Not resonating so much in that way for you. So I really like that as well. That. That idea of when you lead with love, you're finding the right people that match your style or maybe a little bit, um, a little bit ahead of you in that stage of life so that you can learn from them and grow to. To where they are. Uh, so, yeah, I think this idea of leading with love versus.

What's the alternative? Thinking about that and allowing yourself in the moment to kind of pause and acknowledge and. And identify, oh, right in this moment, I'm leading with fear. Like, last night, I was at the bookstore around the corner from our house. We told the kids we would be gone for 30 minutes, and it was for a friend's book signing, so I was waiting in line for a long time to get her book signed, and I was leading with fear. In my mind, I'm like, oh, no, the kids are going to be anxious that we're not back.

And so I sent my husband home a little bit early. It was also getting late and close to bedtime. It was like, 08:00 so I was like, why don't you go and I'll stay? And he was like, the kids were fine. They were listening to a podcast. But I was leading with fear. I was leading with anxiety. I was leading with, oh, no, what if? And at least I had gotten to that level of awareness where I told him while we were waiting in line, my anxiety is getting to me. I am afraid they are. They are going to get afraid.

And we talked, you know, we talked through that, at least, so we still acted on the fear. So, still working on it. But at the end of the day, it was okay because my husband had to start bedtime. It was his night, and I got to stay and celebrate with my friend briefly and walk back home. So it was nice because I got a walk in. So ultimately, it's kind of like what Rachel was saying a little bit where, you know, you don't have to plan, you don't have to worry, because the universe is going to work itself out.

Hi, Stefan. Amelia. Steven, Amelia. Oh, my gosh. Hopefully I got that right. I was going to say, it's so hard sometimes with. With these names, sometimes the. You never know which, uh, syllable to put the accentuation on. So Steven, Amelia is, I think, how you would pronounce that. Maybe it's Stefan, Amelia. I don't know. So the phonetics is always fun for that. But that idea of, yeah, I did actually lead with fear last night a little bit and also a little bit of love, because I was like, I. Stefan is the right one.

Thank you. There we go, Stefan. So I got it wrong both times because I said Steven, not Stefan. There we go. So I was leading with a little bit of fear and a little bit of love, which was, I wanted my son to actually get to sleep on time for a change because he's been up late and then not waking up, and then we're late in the morning and you know, that cycle, if you are a parent and it ties back to that. I appreciate that, Stefan. To share. To share. I know I have to sometimes do my phonetic spelling and I'm like, uh, for, uh, and then the word nee knee and then l a law.

So, uh, ni la. And I would type to you now, but we don't have that feature yet. I know. I'm sure it's coming. Um, but yeah, that idea of, same with what Rachel was kind of saying in her affirmations of sort of the universe is going to figure it out anyway. So maybe when you trust in that, then sometimes the reaction really might matter for that moment, but it will unravel to where you need to be no matter what. And I needed to be walking home last night in the rain, which was totally, totally fine.

Okay, so chick fil a vibes. See, I don't. Is it chick fil a or is it chick fil a? Because I totally have had that conversation before and I probably could google it and find out, but haven't. Speak wonder leading says leading from others expectations will often trip me up big time. Better to be my authentic self. Yeah. I think other people's expectations often rule us, especially as, you know, children or depending on who we're around. I just finished a wonderful book about south asian culture called they called us exceptional by Prachi Gupta.

And it was exactly that. Living up to other people's expectations. You know, in indian culture, it's if you're not a doctor, a lawyer, or like a business professional, like don't come home kind of thing. And obviously that's changing now. But back in the nineties, when I was a young child here, first generation american, it was very rare to see Indian Americans doing anything that was not one of those fields, you know, because of that expectation of what will other people think that, like. And the trend of indian parents to actually communicate what they want for their child by using what other people think.

Like, oh, so and so Auntie said this about you, and then it's like, oh, okay, does that mean I need to, like, do something different? Right. So that the other people's expectations, really, really a driving force in indian culture, for sure. And also along with that is the culture of loving and respecting and seeing your parents as the end all, be all of what you're supposed to do, that kind of mentality. And so growing up, there was a little bit of that struggle as well, but it opened up more and more.

The more we stayed and became, the more, I mean, you know, I was born here so like, I'm american so the more we were in that culture, the more and I think my parents also were a little bit slack and not as indian as some of the other indian tiger Momish folks were. But there's definitely that. There was definitely that other people's expectations and that's fear right? That's judgment. That's what will people think. That's doubt, that's unworthiness. That's all of that makes you act in a certain way that's not being true to yourself.

And that's a really huge point that when we are speak wonder that when we are our authentic self we are living out the life that allows us to be free to be happy the way we want and that's leading with love. So with that, I will take off from here and I hope that some little nugget will stick with you for the rest of the day and hopefully with how you lead the rest of your evening and onto the rest of your days. Wishing you love, strength and awareness. Bye.